Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/124

 which aims to create a freely accessible, citable, reliable XML-encoded version of Nietzsche’s works.37 As another instance, one might also consider the liberal rewriting of academic material into a Wikipedia article, always with citation of course. A more extensive list of such projects can be found on the website of the Text Encoding Initiative.38

It is also important to note that nothing in the CC BY licenses ‘constitutes or may be construed as permission to assert or imply that You [as a reuser] are, or that Your use of the Licensed Material is, connected with, or sponsored, endorsed, or granted ofﬁcial status by, the Licensor’. In other words, a reuser cannot imply that the original author (the licensor) condones the subsequent reuse of the work. Finally, as a reuser, ‘if requested by the Licensor, You must remove any of the information required [to attribute the work] to the extent reasonably practicable’.39 This means that the licensor (the original author) may request that their attribution be removed and thus they be disafﬁliated from the work. The licensor (the original author) cannot, however, request that the work be taken down.

For the academy, this is interesting. Broadly speaking, the requirements of the CC BY licenses are: (1) attribution (without implying endorsement); (2) indication of modiﬁcation; (3) the right to removal of attribution. This sounds similar to the deﬁnition of the needs of a researcher. Researchers need to be able to reproduce material and they need to attribute it. They also need, through the intra-institutional context, to specify any changes, including any ellipses, changes of emphasis etc. On this last point, the legal aspects of the Creative Commons license are not wholly in alignment with the social needs of the academy since the CC BY licenses do not require the modiﬁer to say how they have changed the material. The licenses also do not allow for the material to be removed if the academy objects (although the alternative to this situation is one in which an author could censor critique through legal copyright mechanisms). It is unclear, however, whether this matters if the social mechanisms of the academy could protect against such behaviour. It is also uncertain what the likelihood and impact of such actions might be when counterpoised with potential beneﬁts.